But this was momentary.  Peter the Destroyer resumed the task which Fate had assigned him, nor faltered again till it was accomplished.  In the course of his search he met with many things that are usually found in the ruins of an old house, and also with some that are not.  What seemed most to the purpose was a rusty key which had been thrust into a chink of the wall, with a wooden label appended to the handle, bearing the initials “P.G.”  Another singular discovery was that of a bottle of wine walled up in an old oven.  A tradition ran in the family that Peter’s grandfather, a jovial officer in the old French war, had set aside many dozens of the precious liquor for the benefit of topers then unborn.  Peter needed no cordial to sustain his hopes, and therefore kept the wine to gladden his success.  Many half-pence did he pick up that had been lost through the cracks of the floor, and some few Spanish coins, and the half of a broken sixpence which had doubtless been a love-token.  There was likewise a silver coronation medal of George III.  But old Peter Goldthwaite’s strong-box fled from one dark corner to another, or otherwise eluded the second Peter’s clutches till, should he seek much farther, he must burrow into the earth.

We will not follow him in his triumphant progress step by step.  Suffice it that Peter worked like a steam-engine and finished in that one winter the job which all the former inhabitants of the house, with time and the elements to aid them, had only half done in a century.  Except the kitchen, every room and chamber was now gutted.  The house was nothing but a shell, the apparition of a house, as unreal as the painted edifices of a theatre.  It was like the perfect rind of a great cheese in which a mouse had dwelt and nibbled till it was a cheese no more.  And Peter was the mouse.

What Peter had torn down, Tabitha had burnt up, for she wisely considered that without a house they should need no wood to warm it, and therefore economy was nonsense.  Thus the whole house might be said to have dissolved in smoke and flown up among the clouds through the great black flue of the kitchen chimney.  It was an admirable parallel to the feat of the man who jumped down his own throat.

On the night between the last day of winter and the first of spring every chink and cranny had been ransacked except within the precincts of the kitchen.  This fated evening was an ugly one.  A snow-storm had set in some hours before, and was still driven and tossed about the atmosphere by a real hurricane which fought against the house as if the prince of the air in person were putting the final stroke to Peter’s labors.  The framework being so much weakened and the inward props removed, it would have been no marvel if in some stronger wrestle of the blast the rotten walls of the edifice and all the peaked roofs had come crashing down upon the owner’s head.  He, however, was careless of the peril, but as wild and restless as the night itself, or as the flame that quivered up the chimney at each roar of the tempestuous wind.